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89 [LAMB, Lady Caroline.] Ada Reis. London: John Murray, 1823 3 volumes, small octavo (154 × 96 mm). Attractive contemporary purple half morocco, drab paper sides, spines lettered in gilt and decorated in gilt and in blind, pale brown endpapers, sprinkled edges. With half-titles. Manuscript inscriptions to first blank in each volume noting L. Pasarin’s receipt of the book from Heinrich Freiherr von Maltzan in December 1849. Edges a little rubbed, a fine copy. first edition of the third novel by Lady Caroline Lamb, again published anonymously, and dedicated to the Irish intellectual Lyd- ia White. Ada Reis has been somewhat neglected by comparison to Lamb’s roman à clef Glenarvon (1816), but it is increasingly recog- nised as a complex work of scholarship and imagination. The tit- ular antihero is born in Georgia and sold into bondage. He boards a privateer, murders the captain, and declares himself a follower of Islam. He deceives many women and commits many misdeeds on his travels around the world and in later life he is described as “the once-famous Corsair, the Don Juan of his day”. Lamb worked from other travellers’ accounts to compose the present novel, provid- ing 61 pages of footnotes acknowledging her debt to such famous works as Volney’s Egypt , Tully’s Tripoly , Herrera’s Voyage to America , and Humboldt’s Tableau de la Nature . She was also inspired by the exploits of the muscleman Belzoni and of William Bankes, a friend of Lord Byron, her former lover, both of whom had explored Egypt. This handsome copy has an appealing provenance, bearing the armorial bookplates of Heinrich Baron von Maltzahn, or Maltzan (1826–1874), the Orientalist, writer, and dandy who grew up part- ly in Britain and was for many years a peripatetic wanderer in the mould of Lamb’s eponymous hero. Garside & Schöwerling 1823:52; not in Wolff, who had Lamb’s two other novels. See Freitag, Ulrike, “Heinrich Freiherr von Maltzan’s ‘My Pilgrimage to Mecca’: A Critical Investigation”, Leiden Studies in Islam and Society , vol. 5, The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire , ed. Umar Ryad, Brill, 2017. £2,500 [125497]
och tillgifvenhet, från förf” (“Misses Falbe Hansen and Grundtvig with gratitude and affection, from the author”). Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was the first woman to be awarded the No- bel Prize in Literature (1909), as well as the first woman to become a member of the Swedish Academy. The present work, “a fascinat- ingly original retelling of old Värmland folk legends in an effusive, personal, spontaneously lyric prose”, launched her career, meeting met with mixed reviews in her native Sweden, but became popu- lar in Denmark where it was published in 1892. Falbe-Hansen and Grundtvig were essential in popularising Gösta Berlings saga in Den- mark and Europe. In 1891 they presented an extract of the work in Kvinden og Samfundet , the newsletter published by the Danish Wom- en’s Alliance and of which Falbe-Hansen was one of the editors. When the complete translation was later published in 1892, they suggested Lagerlöf meet with Georg Brandes, the leading Scandi- navian critic and literary scholar of the period, whose positive re- view of Gösta Berlings saga in Politiken on 16 January 1893 ensured the work’s popularity in Denmark. Falbe-Hansen also assisted Lagerlöf in getting in touch with a German translator, ensuring a wider Eu- ropean audience for the debut. Apart from a close working relationship with Lagerlöf, Fal- be-Hansen and Grundtvig shared the author’s commitment to women’s rights and suffrage. Falbe-Hansen was a member of the Danish Women’s Alliance and the Women’s Reading Circle, as well as one of the cofounder of the Danish Women’s National Coun- cil, and she regularly campaigned for women’s rights at meetings across Denmark ( Den Store Danske Encyklopædi ). Smith, Horatio (ed.), Dictionary of Modern European Literature , Columbia University Press, 1947, pp. 463–4. £4,500 [103054]
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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